Sunday, November 6, 2016

When King Brennus of the Celts (pictured) led an army against
the fledgling Roman Republic in 390 BC, the Romans fought bravely but were ultimately
unable to defend their city against the barbarian horde. Soon six of Rome's
seven hills had fallen to the invaders, and the desperate defenders, besieged on
the Capitoline Hill, agreed to pay a ransom of 1,000 pounds of gold to save
their city. King Brennus provided a balance to measure out the thousand pounds,
but the Romans complained that he was using unfair weights. "Vae Victus!"
- the Celtic King angrily exclaimed, "Woe unto the vanquished!" as he
tossed his heavy sword belt onto the Celts' side of the scales.

"Woe
unto the vanquished!" - a phrase that will ring true to American
conservatives if we lose Tuesday's presidential election. It makes sense for
conservative ideologues to be lukewarm about Donald Trump - I need not list the
reasons. But while it is fair to criticize some of Mr. Trump's ideas, it would
be dishonest not to admit that he loves America and believes in defending many
of the principles that our Republic was founded upon. This can't be said of Hillary
Clinton - if she wins, then woe unto the vanquished! I'll devote the remainder
of this article to a summary of what conservatives can expect if our party
loses.

The
consequences of defeat can be expressed in terms of two numbers, Four and Five.
America will suffer four more years of President Obama's policies, and at least five
liberals in solid control of the Supreme Court.

Four
more years of Obama's policies may well be more than America can endure. Under
Obama, the total national debt increased by about $8 trillion, and exceed the
gross domestic product for the first time in our nation's history. Clinton will
continue the trend. Right now, politicians can get away with this by making the
Fed create artificially low interest rates on the order of 1 percent. But the
world is continually placing less and less trust in American currency. Sooner
or later, the whole rotting system will collapse, and faced with paying 3 or 4
percent interest (and making interest the largest federal budget item after
Medicare), the current financial system will collapse.

Add
to that Secretary Clinton's history of putting the interests of wealthy elites
over ordinary Americans in her trade and immigration policies, as well as her
general hostility toward American industry and business in general (except for
her friends in the finance sector). Hillary openly boasts of putting coal
miners out of business, because in Hillary's America, the only jobs that are
allowed to exist are the politically correct ones.

And
then there is four more years of the Obama foreign policy. The Islamic State
will still be around in four years, carrying out its work of death with as
little real opposition as it has faced during the last three. Meanwhile, expect
Clinton's tendency to get involved in useless wars with countries that aren't
really hostile toward America to continue.

The Russians have lost lives to ISIS
just like the Americans, and ought to be our allies in this conflict, but
the foreign policy establishment of which Clinton is a part regularly flirts with war with Russia. The cause will likely
involve President Putin's support for Bashar al Assad. Assad is a dictator, but
American opposition to his regime is nevertheless a foolish policy, as the only
other power vying for control of Syria is ISIS.

But
this is just the first four years. It is with President Clinton's other great act, appointing a fifth liberal to the Supreme Court, that she will have Americans saying "Woe
unto the vanquished" long after her own generation has gone to the dust.

Liberals
have almost controlled the Court for
the last five decades. In the early '70s, the makeup was 4-1-4: four liberals,
one conservative, and four swing voters. Liberals won nearly all the time,
since they only had to convince one of the four swing voters to take their
side. The swing voters were amenable to striking down laws that they didn't
like, at both the federal and state level, but were generally unwilling to do
anything that would totally eviscerate the other branches of government. That
is how, for example, they were able to legalize abortion by a 7 to 2 vote (with
the Court's last principled moderate, Byron White, joining conservative William
Rehnquist of Arizona in dissent), while an attempt to force the government to
fund abortion against the will of Congress failed 5 to 4, in the 1980 case Harris v. McRae.

Meanwhile,
other cases often left Rehnquist as the sole dissenter. In one of these, the Bob Jones University case, the
eight-justice majority decided that a religious institution could lose its tax-exempt
status for engaging in conduct which the government deemed discriminatory. Rehnquist's
frequent dissents earned him a new nickname: The Lone Ranger.

Under
the Reagan and first Bush administrations, things improved, but only slightly. Rehnquist
was elevated to Chief Justice, and one swing voter and one liberal were
replaced with conservatives, leading to a 3-3-3 balance in the early '90s. But
all this came crashing down when Bill Clinton replaced Byron White with Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, restoring the liberal faction to four members, where it remains
to this day. Meanwhile, swing voters still decide the balance of the court, so
its big decisions can generally go either way.

But
all this will end if Hillary Clinton appoints a fifth liberal, something which,
with Justice Scalia's seat vacant, she could do on her first day in office. The
liberal voting bloc has almost no internal variation - statistical analysis
reveals that it's more common for all four liberals to vote the same way than
for any two of the conservatives to
agree on a specific case. While Republican appointees often disappoint the
party that chose them, Democrats never do.

Here
is what the five liberals will most likely do: They will overturn Harris v. McRae and strike down the HydeAmendment, leading to full Medicare coverage of abortion. They will also get
rid of nearly all remaining abortion restrictions, such as mandatory waiting
periods and bans on late-term and partial birth abortions.

Justice
Kennedy's assurance, when legalizing
same-sex marriage, that "it must be emphasized that religions, and those who
adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate... that, by divine
precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned" will probably last
only as long as Kennedy is the swing vote. With five liberals in charge, the
Court will extend the Bob Jones
ruling to sexual orientation, so that any institution that doesn't accept the
Court's doctrine on marriage will be subject to heavy punitive taxation. This
will break the backs of religious universities, making it impossible for them (and
also perhaps religious hospitals that won't perform abortions) to continue to
exist.

Building
upon the Hyde Amendment case, the liberal Court will continue to usurp
Congress' power of the purse, deciding that more and more services (education,
health care, etc.) are fundamental human rights, and that the government must
pay for them whether Congress approves or not. They will order the bureaucrats
in the Treasury to write the checks, and the bureaucrats, being the Quislings
they are, will comply.

Most
of our country's policy is already set by judges and bureaucrats, with Congress
coming into the picture mainly at money-time. If Congress is stripped of its
power of the purse, it will become almost entirely irrelevant in our political
system. With our elected representatives entirely cut out of the picture while
liberal technocrats extend their power without end, conservatives will come to
know the truth in King Brennus' words: "Woe unto the vanquished!"

And
what of the naysayers, those who insist that Trump is just as bad as Clinton? I
have already addressed the issue of his womanizing, and do not intend to do so
again. To the complaint that his fiscal policy is fantastical, it is enough to say
that Trump is a dealmaker, and the deals he makes with Congressional leadership
will feature some sort of compromise between Trumpism and ordinary
Republican policies. In other words, they will be much better than what Hillary
and the Democrats intend to do.

Finally,
on Supreme Court nominations, some have questioned Trump's conservative
credentials and complained that he cannot be relied upon to pick judges devoted
to the Constitution. This was a legitimate argument in the primaries, but it
falls flat when his opponent is Hillary Clinton. We know exactly what kind of
judges she will choose - every Democratic nominee in the past fifty years has consistently
ruled as a liberal.

Trump
could break his promise to only nominate judges from the list of 21 conservative jurists that he recently
provided. But he probably won't. He has no reason to fight his own party's congressional
leadership to get a liberal judge onto the Court. Furthermore, history shows that Trump's promise is of the kind that generally gets kept. Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan made some poor choices for the
Court, but his central promise - to appoint a woman - was upheld. Conservatives
can probably expect the same thing from Trump. He has promised to appoint from
one of the greatest lists of Constitutionalist judges ever assembled, and it
would be politically reckless for him not to do so.

But if Trump loses, then from the moment
of the fifth liberal's enthronement onwards, conservatives will have nothing
left to do but plaintively repeat King Brennus' words: "Woe unto the
vanquished!"

Monday, October 24, 2016

In
this age of talking points, stunted discourse, and politicking-by-twitter, it's
easy to lose sight of the beauty of the English language at its best. In the
spirit of making politics more eloquent (while at the same time lightening up
the mood), I've put my thoughts on my favored presidential candidate into
verse, to the familiar tune of Yankee Doodle:

Thursday, October 20, 2016

The Truth About Evan
McMullin – And Why I Am So Disappointed in My Mormon Friends For Falling For
This

I
challenge any Evan McMullin supporter to tell me what they knew about Evan
McMullin a year ago. Unless you are one of maybe a hundred people who ran into
him at your ward picnic, the answer is nothing. That’s my answer and I am a
huge political junkie. To the dismay of my family I can
rattle on about all sorts of obscure politicians and behind the scenes players
who influence elected politicians, but for the life of me I couldn’t have told
you a thing about Evan McMullin... because he was a nobody.

McMullin
worked for the UN for a bit. He worked for the CIA for 10 years – doing what?
He can’t really tell us much….“It’s secret.” He worked for the bankers at
Goldman Sachs for a few years…. “His work was private.” And then he went to
work for the Republican House Conference where he did… well he can’t really
say…“it’s confidential.”

On his Facebook
page for the three years prior to running for President, he never posted about
social issues, economic, or domestic issues. He says now he is personally
against gay marriage but thinks the Supreme Court's decision is fine and wants
to move on. Summer 2016 rolls around and political outsider Donald Trump wins
the Republican nomination and suddenly Evan McMullin is the 3rd party choice of
establishment Republicans from the Bush and Romney families and of the Wall
Street donor wing of the GOP.

I have
been a Republican since I first registered to vote. I have worked with hundreds
of Republican campaigns going back 20 years, I have served in party office here
in Arizona. I have always supported Republican candidates but I will be the
first to tell you that there are a lot of dirty Republicans. The reason so many
people look at politics today and say there is no difference between the
Republican and the Democrat on their ballot is because all too often it’s true.

There
is a powerful and established section of the Republican leadership (elected
officials, party members, big donors) who do not support the values of
grassroots conservative Republicans. They are bought and paid for by large
corporate interests. They seek the approval of the liberal media, academia, and
Hollywood. They support open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, free trade
even when it’s not in most Americans’ best interest, gay marriage, abortion,
euthanasia, and a plethora of foolish wars and bad foreign policy.

These
Republicans are terrified that if Donald Trump is elected president there will
be major shakeups in Washington. He will shine a light on the dark backroom
deals that have resulted in policies like Obamacare, The failed war in Syria,
and 20 trillion dollars in debt. The livelihoods of their wealthy corporate
backers are on the line and with that their own power and perks in Washington.
For that reason they would rather see Hillary Clinton become president than
Donald Trump. They feel like they can work with Hillary.

So enter
Evan McMullin, Crony Capitalist Spoiler. No one in the world including Evan
McMullin believes Evan McMullin is going to be elected President. What the
corrupted Republican establishment and the Clinton campaign hope is that he
will keep Donald Trump from getting to 270 electoral votes and thus guarantee a
Hillary presidency.

But
How? Enter the Mormon Suckers. I am proud to be a Mormon so it pains me to say
what I am about say. When the GOP Establishment Never Trumpers and their
Clinton allies went looking for a 3rd party spoiler they needed someone with a
constituency of sheeple who would follow him regardless of the obvious logical
outcome (President Hillary.) There were
plenty of Republican politicians who had lost to Trump in the primary or who
had foregone a run in 2016 and didn’t like Trump much or were outright hostile
to him, but not a one of them would put their name on the line and be the fall
guy who put Hillary in office. So plan B – find a weak-minded demographic and
create a leader for them.

I know
a lot of Mormons. Most of them are Republicans. Most of them are pretty
conservative Republicans. A good number these days still vote Republican but
are registered independents because they support more conservative or Tea Party
values than they see in the current Republican Party. There are great Mormon
conservatives serving in DC and in state offices throughout the country.
Mormons are proud to point out that Utah is the State where Bill Clinton didn’t
just lose, he got 3rd place in the 1992 presidential election.

The LDS
Church does not endorse candidates. The LDS Church leadership does however
strongly encourage it members to be informed, to be involved, to vote and to
serve. The Mormon demographic is overwhelmingly pro-life, pro-family, anti-communist,
and protective of the Constitution they believe was divinely inspired. So how
do you get these folks to throw an election to Hillary Clinton, someone whom
most of them revile? It’s a complex but straightforward sociological scheme. In
addition to being hardworking, God fearing, Mom, Apple Pie and Baseball loving
Americans, Mormons are also some of the biggest suckers in the nation.

Utah
leads the nation in financial fraud schemes. Anti-Mormon critics like to point
out the huge amount of Ponzi schemes, real estate fraud, and stock swindles and
say it is because Mormons are sneaky, greedy liars. Make no bones about it. Like in any community
there some bad apples and Utah has its fair share. In that fair share there are
plenty of Mormons but Mormons are no more criminal than most, in fact
statistically they are quite a bit less criminal than the average American. But
the real reason that Utah frauds are so successful is not that the conmen are
any wilier than a Baptist or Catholic conman. It’s because they have a highly
homogenous market of overly trusting people. They want to believe you’re a good
person and they want to help out the good person.

In 2016
that good person is Evan McMullin. The Never Trumpers couldn't talk Romney into
another run, or Huntsman or any Mormon politician you had ever heard of. So they created Evan McMullin from thin air
and Goldman Sachs receipts. Evan is a good member of the Church. Mormons are
tight knit and like to support their own, hence Mitt Romney's 93% win in the
2012 Utah primary despite the fact the many Utah Republicans had more in common
politically with Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum.

So here
comes the conman’s pitch – “Evan is a good man, he’s one of us, you don’t have
to vote for dirty nasty Donald Trump who has been divorced twice, who swears a
lot, who won’t apologize when he hurts people’s feelings.” This is where not
all, not even most, but a sadly sizeable number or Mormon patsies reach for
their wallet, or in this case their ballot.
They've been told and sold that by voting for Evan they don’t have to
shed their values and principles. They don’t have to choose the lesser of two
evils. But that is the lie that the Evan McMullin candidacy is built on,
because in 2016 you do have to choose between one of two people who will be the
next President: Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. A vote for anyone but Trump
helps Clinton to move ahead and to defeat Trump.

A
Hillary Clinton presidency is one where she will most likely appoint three
Supreme Court Justices. They will be radical liberals. They will stand against
everything political that good and faithful Mormons believe in. They will gut
the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Amendments. They will force all Christians denominations
to have gay clergy and to perform gay weddings in their churches or
temples. They will bring back abortion
on demand at any time during the pregnancy, paid for by taxpayers, performed in
church owned hospitals, performed by Christian doctors who will be forced to do
so or lose their license. Euthanasia will be the law of the land, not just for
the terminally ill and elderly but for handicapped and unwanted children.

Did you
imagine 20 years ago that gay marriage would be legal in all 50 states,
mandated by liberal judges despite the sentiment of voters? Did you imagine you
would be forced to buy overpriced and underperforming health insurance or be
fined by the government? And these things came about with a Supreme Court that
was evenly split between conservatives and liberals. Hillary’s new liberal
Court will steamroll the America you once knew. You won’t recognize it
anymore. Her tried and failed economic
policies of higher taxes and more spending will eventually bankrupt our nation.
Her support for wars and conflicts not in our interest will bleed the best of
our youth.

This is
an election with dire consequences. Donald Trump is no saint, Latter Day or
otherwise, but he loves America, he respects the rights of Christians, he has
vowed to appoint judges who will protect life, the rights of churches, the
rights of gun owners and our Constitution as it was written. It's OK to vote
for Donald Trump. Read Dennis Prager's
excellent article ‘In Defense of Pro-Trump Christians,’ and then join the
millions of other Christians who will be voting Trump to save our country from
the terrible alternative. Most of the Mormons I know are voting Trump but you
can and should be more vocal about it. You need to let your friends and
neighbors know that it's OK. You need to encourage the less likely voters to go
the polls and you need to keep them from the conman.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

This article originally appeared as a letter to the editor in Prescott's newspaper, The Daily Courier.

Donald Trump’s statement
that the late 1940s and ‘50s were a great era for America has come under unfair
criticism from Democrats. I write in defense of this past era, not
because I believe in a perfect past, but because I realize that much that was
good about America has been lost. While I can understand why Mr. Trump’s
rhetoric would worry people who think only about the uglier aspects of our
nation’s history, it seems quite ridiculous to assume that every social change
was a move in the right direction. I’d like to point out three specific ways in
which our country has been backsliding over the years.

I'll begin with what
Mr. Trump has said is “a big issue, a horrible issue, and a very important one.
It's called law and order. We want law and order.” According to the FBI, murder
rates are now higher than in the mid 1950s, and rape is nearly three times more
common than in 1960, the earliest year in the dataset. Robbery has risen 70%,
and burglary is up by 260%. The inner cities, where Democrats have ruled for
the last half century, are suffering the worst.

The second issue
concerns employment. In 1950, 86% of men aged 16 and older were working. Now
the figure is barely 69%. The fraction of men not working has more than
doubled. Industrial workers have suffered the most, with mining and
manufacturing jobs being outsourced. As the ability of men, especially young
high school graduates, to support a family has declined, so have marriage
rates. In 1960, 72% of American adults were married; that figure has now shrunk
to 50%.

Hillary Clinton
believes in abandoning blue-collar workers and instead focusing on high-tech
and service sector jobs. She boasts of putting coal miners out of business. But
America can do better than building an economy that only values the most
skilled laborers. When Benjamin Franklin wrote to Europeans considering
immigration to America, he admitted “there are very few [in America] that in
Europe would be called rich,” and instead emphasized America’s favorable
conditions for the working poor. Unfortunately, in recent decades these conditions
have largely disappeared. Mr. Trump’s opponents have criticized him for getting
so much support from voters without a college degree, but perhaps they neglect
to consider that he may be the only candidate who cares about these people’s
future?

The third issue I will address is abortion. In the 1950s, this abhorrent practice was illegal in
all 48 states. Now, it is legal nationwide, and many of the largest abortion
providers are funded by the government. Quite frankly, not much can be said in
support of a society that abandons one fourth of its children to such an awful
fate. It can hardly be called progress when a nation decides that someone whose
life once had legal protection now has none. Has there ever been a country that
came to regret granting basic human rights to too many of its inhabitants?

It isn’t without reason
that Mr. Trump has promised to make America great again. “Every day I wake up determined to deliver for the people I
have met all across this nation that have been ignored, neglected and
abandoned,” says Trump. “These are people who work hard but no longer have a
voice. I am your voice.”

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

When election season comes around, one can expect
Republicans to emphasize their role as the party of fiscal responsibility,
while the Democrats trot out their old argument to the contrary. They say that
since recent Democratic presidents, such as Clinton and Obama, have left office
with a smaller deficit than they started with, while Republicans like Bush and
Reagan have done the opposite, we should actually be looking to Democrats for leadership
in taking on the debt.

My desire is to refute this argument, and also to
expose a fundamental flaw in the way Democrats think about our Republic. While
it is true that Clinton and Obama have left (or will leave) office with the
budget in good condition, one shouldn’t forget that they’re also leaving office
with a Republican Congress.

Under our Constitution, it’s up to Congress, not the
President, to write the budget, and the House of Representatives plays the
dominant role. Not satisfied with what people in the media (who tend to give
all the credit or blame to the President) had to say about the relationship
between parties and debt, I decided to research the issue for myself.

From 1955-1995, a span of 40 years, the House was
controlled by Democrats without interruption. During the latter half of this
period the average deficit was 3.5 percent of GDP.

From 1995-2007, America had a Republican House. The
average deficit was 0.8 percent of GDP.

After the Democrats came back, in 2007-2011, the
deficit reached an obscene 7.2 percent of GDP.

During the present period, with Republicans in the
majority, the figure fell to 4.0 percent of GDP.

I think we tend to make a grave mistake by assigning
all the praise or blame for these things to the President, especially on an
issue like the budget, where he has little direct control. The Democrats’ lust
for centralized power often leads them to regard our nation as a monarchy where
the President is in charge and the Congress’ job is to advance his agenda. But
Republicans and Independents can do better than to follow this line of
reasoning.

So let’s be proud of the fact that, in our system,
decisions are in the hands of the many and not the few or the one. We got rid
of the monarchy for a reason. And if you’re concerned about the burden of debt
we leave on future generations, then vote Republican. We are, after all, in a
Republic.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

I write this blog post in response to a recent scandal involving leaked audiotapes of Donald Trump discussing his many adulterous affairs. While I am certainly dismayed by these revelations, I am not surprised by them, and I stand firm in my support for the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

I have no illusions regarding Mr. Trump's lewd and lascivious private conduct. I knew of it in the primary, when there were still virtuous men in the running, and I voted for one of Trump's opponents. That he is a rake is beyond question, but I will not allow the dark underside of Donald Trump's personal history to distract me from what this election is really about.

Sordid as they may be, the private lives of politicians should not take precedence over the things they intend to do with the powers they seek. Anyone who has voted for John McCain, who is an adulterer, or who admires the legacy of Ronald Reagan, the first divorced president, can understand this. There are two people who might win in November. One of them, for all his flaws, has nonetheless shown a sincere desire to stand up for the rights of Americans. The other is openly hostile to everything that conservatives such as myself believe in.

The addition of another womanizer to our nation's list of presidents simply does not compare to the abolition of free speech, religious liberty, and second and tenth amendment rights that would surely be accomplished under Hillary Clinton and her chosen bureaucrats and judges. A solid majority of five liberal Supreme Court Justices would strike down the Hyde Amendment and break down all other right-of-conscience barriers that prevent religious people like myself from having to engage in activities which are repugnant to us.

In a country where decent men and women are in the minority, we can't survive without allies among the heathen. I see Mr. Trump as one of those allies.

I realize that, in my last post, I spoke of a single future article explaining how my conservative principles on a list of issues are based in my belief in individual rights and respect for the Forgotten Man. Since then, I've come to doubt the usefulness of such long articles, so in the future, I plan to stick to brief posts more narrowly focused on specific conservative ideas.

What follows is my first such post. I originally wrote it in response to a question on another website asking why a young person would buck the trend and choose to be a conservative. Here's my answer:

As a conservative, I base my politics around basic human rights: life, liberty, and property. The purpose of government is to protect these rights, and America owes her greatness in large part to the fact that government has, throughout most of her history, been restrained to this purpose.

Liberals, in general, do not share conservatives' respect for inalienable rights. Rights are brought up frequently in liberal discourse, but easily discarded when they don't fit the narrative. The liberal will respond to one person’s sympathy-inducing problem with a solution that runs roughshod over the rights of others. Applied repeatedly, this leads to rampant "legal plunder" where nobody's rights are secure.

Children and young people, being out of power and easily ignored, generally get the raw end of liberal policies, especially on entitlements and deficit spending. I see conservatism as the natural choice for someone my age - conservatives are more concerned about the future generation, and don't see policies that harm them as being appropriate solutions for the current generation's problems.

All liberal policies hinge on what Yale professor William Graham Sumner called "the Forgotten Man" - he who, while totally absent from the liberal rhetoric surrounding a policy, nevertheless pays the cost of that policy. Liberals win by making the issue look like it’s about everyone but the Forgotten Man.

Consider the debacle of the Affordable Care Act. The law's benefits are clearly visible, in the form of millions of people who credit it for their health insurance. It's easy to accuse anyone who's against the law of hating these people. But look for the Forgotten Man, and you will find him. People who lost their insurance or saw their premiums rise, but more especially those who can't find work because the law makes hiring more difficult. Is the Forgotten Man easy to see? Hardly. Nobody gets a call saying that he would have been hired except for the new regulations on anyone with more than 50 employees. All of which goes to show that this law is a classic example of the concentration of benefits and obfuscation of costs, a classical tactic for progressives.

Similarly, one can identify (with varying degrees of difficulty) the Forgotten Man in liberal policies on deficit spending, entitlements, corporate taxes and regulation, education policy, environmentalism, and, most tragically, abortion. The victims are often poor (consider who hurts the most when the price of energy goes up) but even more often they are young; perhaps they haven't been born yet. All of which plays well into the hands of liberal policy-makers, whose goal is to make the general public forget about them.